The Second Coming of RG3

And the Lord said unto his flock in Washington, "Take this young man, this impossibly gifted quarterback, and watch him hoist your moribund franchise upon his shoulders and into the playoffs." And lo, it was good. Sweet Jesus, was it good. And then RG3's greedy head coach ran him into the ground and blew out his knee. But now the young quarterback has returned, and his followers are ready to rejoice again. But lo, they're terrified. Sweet Jesus, are they terrified. It's the blessing and the curse of Robert Griffin III, the joy that could turn to agony at any moment. People, can we get an amen?

Everyone was crying. RG3 himself got it started, lying there in his hospital bed, totally immobile. Then his fiancée, Rebecca, and his mom welled up. Jackie never wanted her only son to play football in the first place, not really—what mother wants her son to play football?—but she relented when the 11-year-old pinkie-promised her he wouldn't get hurt. And now this. Finally, even the quarterback's military father, Robert Griffin Jr., the retired sergeant, the Iraq vet, "the guy who never cries," according to his son—not even RG2 could choke back the tears.

It was January 9, 2013, three days after Griffin's historic rookie season ended with a nasty twist of his right knee in a playoff loss to the Seattle Seahawks, and minutes after Griffin had woken up from surgery in Florida, opening his eyes to a real-life nightmare. His blown-out right knee was bandaged, but so was his healthy left one. That meant Dr. Andrews—James Andrews, one of the most celebrated orthopedic surgeons in America, the same guy who rebuilt Adrian Peterson's miracle knee a year earlier—had needed to take a tendon graft from the left knee in order to repair the right.

Two shredded ligaments, the LCL and ACL. Major reconstructive surgery. Seven to nine months of rehab. Minimum.

A jumble of thoughts swirled and drifted into his foggy consciousness—flashbacks to the play that knocked him out, fears about whether he'd be ready for next season—and for once in his short and blessed life, Robert Griffin III just couldn't deal. He didn't feel like talking to the nurse, who hadn't noticed that he'd come to. "So instead of trying to cope with that at the moment," he recalls now, "I just went back to sleep."

When he woke a short while later, he felt ready. Or at least readier. As his parents stood over his bed, Griffin apologized. "After I tore my ACL in college, I told them I would never do that to them again," he says, referring to the 2009 ACL surgery—same knee—that cost him most of his sophomore season at Baylor. "So when I woke up this time, I said, 'I'm sorry.' I knew the kind of pain it was going to put them through, especially my mom. I'm the baby. I'm the only son. She doesn't want to see her baby boy get hurt."

Dr. Andrews joined them and reported that the procedure had gone well. When the conversation turned to rehab—specifically, When can I start?—Griffin had an idea: "Hey, when's our first game?"

At home against Philly. The season's inaugural Monday-night game. At the time, though, Griffin figured it was on a Sunday. September 8. Eight months into the uncertain future. So he grabbed his phone and reset his passcode to four digits that would serve as a mantra and motivator during the grueling and tedious and painful months ahead: 9813.

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It's a cool and drizzly late-spring day in exurban Virginia, and the flag at Redskins Park is flying at half-mast, a tribute to Deacon Jones, the great pass rusher who died a few days ago. Jones played his fourteenth and final season with the Redskins, and while he's considered one of the greatest defensive ends of all time, a blur of speed and muscle who revolutionized the art of tormenting quarterbacks, his most lasting contribution is that he coined the word sack. He was, of course, exactly the kind of assassin who might someday end Griffin's career, in much the same gruesome and definitive way that Lawrence Taylor forced the retirement of the Redskins' last legitimate franchise QB, Joe Theismann, on Monday Night Football back in 1985.

Forgive me the fatalism. See, I've been an embarrassingly rabid Redskins fan for an embarrassingly long time, and for many of those years the Redskins were embarrassingly bad. Which is why last season was so, so glorious. It took just one game, that astonishing debut in the Griffin family's ancestral hometown of New Orleans, for everything—everything—to feel different. RG3 went 19-for-26 that day, two TD passes, no picks, 320 yards in the air, another forty-two on the ground, and became the first rookie quarterback ever to win Offensive Player of the Week in his first game.

The future! There he is right now, unofficially practicing at practice. He's not medically cleared to fully participate, so he's throwing balls to a group of also-rehabbing receivers, including wideout Pierre Garçon and tight end Fred Davis, who dubbed RG3 "black Jesus" last season. After throwing, Griffin does some "explosive sprinting" along the sideline, the newest phase of his rehab. (Next step: planting that knee and cutting.) There's a performative vibe to practice today, and Griffin tosses some grins to the fans as he dashes past the viewing area, his braids whipping the air behind him.

"I say you have to be 'patiently aggressive,' " he tells me a few hours later. "Aggressive when they let you. Patient when they need you to be patient."

Patience was certainly required after Griffin's heard-round-the-league debut: The Skins won just two more times over the next two months. But every game was tight, and those losses piled up in spite of Griffin's stellar play, never because of it. You just knew good things were coming, and someday soon, too. And then the kid, this supremely confident athletic genius, decided he didn't feel like waiting for the roster to improve around him. After his teammates voted him co-captain in November, RG3 led his 3-6 Redskins on a season-ending seven-game win streak that culminated with a cathartic victory at home over the hated Cowboys, giving Washington its first NFC East title in thirteen years. RG3 finished the season with the highest passer rating (102.4) and touchdown-to-interception ratio (4:1) of any rookie in NFL history, besting Andrew Luck and Russell Wilson for Offensive Rookie of the Year. "It's better than a dream," he told me when I interviewed him during the season. And it was.

As the Redskins head to the showers after today's minicamp session, I catch up with long-suffering Redskins receiver Santana Moss. "He's just a good kid, for one, and a hell of a fucking athlete," he says. "There's a lot of guys [on the team] that have been doing this for years and been waiting for that kind of guy to be a part of this team. You can't do nothing but follow him." There's a fervor to the way Griffin's teammates talk about him, a level of intensity and conviction that belies the usual sports platitudes. Even Mike Shanahan, the hard-ass archetype of an NFL coach, can't help but do his version of clipped, tough-guy gushing when I sit down with him after practice: "What did he do last year? He had the best [rookie] year in the history of the game. Best rating ever. Handles the football extremely well. That's why he's had the attention that he's had."

And yet. The injuries. They started early. Game five against Atlanta. I was in the stands at FedEx Field for Griffin's first concussion, an easily avoidable sideline hit that knocked him out of the game (and also seemed to vacuum every particle of oxygen out of the stadium). This was the thing about Griffin, his only real flaw. That supreme athletic confidence manifesting as a kind of athletic impunity. Back in seventh grade, when he vowed to his mom that he wouldn't get hurt, he told her the defense wouldn't even be able to catch him. And for a while, they couldn't. But now the Shanahans—Mike and his son Kyle, the offensive coordinator—were fully exploiting Griffin's speed, designing runs out of the zone-read offense, exposing RG3 to defenders that could not only catch him but cripple him.

He was chipping away at the boundaries of the position, yes, but as the season progressed and the Shanahans came under fire for running him so much, you realized that Griffin and his coaches were creating something else, too. Unintentionally. Not just a new style of play but a new emotional ingredient to the experience of watching football. Has there ever been a QB whose game inspires such a strange and dissonant mixture of joy and dread in the mind of the fan? The very things that make RG3 so spectacular are also what make him so vulnerable. The elusiveness and unpredictability, the track speed, that lethal combination of improvisational brilliance and unflappable calm, the sense that he's able to warp the geometry of the field to his will and his skill—it all coalesces into this weird, pulse-quickening expectation that at any moment you might see him do something that no QB has ever done before. And sure, that's electrifying, but is it wise? Watching Griffin play, you feel these ever-present and oppositional impulses: You want to bust him loose and rein him in, all at the same time, every single second. If the Shanahans didn't feel that tension last year, they'll certainly feel it more acutely this season. Managing that friction, respecting it, finding the right balance between what they can do (that's the easy part) and what they should do (much harder), is by far the trickiest and most important challenge they'll face in season two of the RG3 Era.

Please, God, let it be an era.

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Griffin is the only Redskin in the weight room, which is surprisingly run-down for the third-most-valuable franchise in the NFL. (Only the Cowboys and the Patriots are worth more than the Skins, according to Forbes, which values the team at $1.6 billion.) Right next to a placard that reads DO NOT DROP DUMBELLS, Griffin drops a 110-pound dumbbell on the padded floor. He's got on a white Adidas tee with big blue letters that say FIGHT TIL IT'S RIGHT blue shorts, blue sneakers, and blue socks pulled up to mid-calf, with white tights under the shorts. Did he choose the blue Gatorade he's drinking to match? It wouldn't surprise me. Griffin subscribes to the Deion Sanders school of sartorial thinking: "If you look good, you feel good, and if you feel good, you play good, and if you play good, they pay good."

His fiancée, in black skinny jeans and a pink-and-white top, follows him from machine to machine. He pauses occasionally to swig from his Gatorade, leaning into Rebecca, saying something, laughing, flashing that toothy, charismatic grin. Griffin often refers to himself as "a natural loner," but he's talking more about friendships, specifically a relative lack of close male ones. (When I asked him, at my 9-year-old son's request, to name his best friend on the team, it took him a good long think to come up with cornerback Richard Crawford.) Family is a different thing. Family, in fact, is everything. Born in Okinawa, Japan, to two military parents—Jacqueline was a sergeant, too—he had a nomadic childhood that makes him seem like he comes from nowhere and everywhere. In one especially peripatetic year, first grade, he attended three different schools: one in Alabama, one in New Orleans, one in Texas. The stint that made the biggest impression, though, was the four months he spent living with relatives in New Orleans' Iberville projects while his mom and dad were away on an assignment in South Korea.

"To this day, I hate roaches. I mean I really hate roaches. So it was bad," he says. "I don't ever want to put anything bad out there about my family, and this isn't so bad, but I got a loose tooth once, and they tied a string around it, tied it to the door, and slammed the door. That's just how they did it. That's what they knew."

Things stabilized when his parents returned from Korea and the family eventually settled in Copperas Cove, a small town in almost the exact geographical center of Texas. Robby was 7 then, his athletic gifts just beginning to reveal themselves. First basketball, then track—he nearly qualified for the 2008 Olympics as a hurdler—and finally football, bringing glory to the Copperas Cove Bulldawgs under the Friday-night lights. He chose Baylor in part because of its track program, and that's where he befriended Brittney Griner, the basketball star who made news in April when she casually confirmed to Sports Illustrated that she's gay. ("I was lost when they said, 'Brittney Griner came out today,' " Griffin tells me. "I know Brittney. I'm close to Brittney. Griner was never in. Everyone knew that.") Baylor is also where he met Rebecca Liddicoat, the petite brunette from Boulder, Colorado, who just popped something—one of those Gatorade gel chews, maybe?—into his mouth after he finished a set of biceps curls.

It's this bio—a military brat with a white wife (they got married in July), a bright and ambitious 23-year-old black man who frequently mentions law school and post-football political aspirations but refuses to name his political orientation—that has fascinated so many people and confused not a few others. None more so, perhaps, than Rob Parker, a former commentator on ESPN's First Take. One day last December, after RG3 had given an interview in which he said, for about the millionth time, that he didn't want to be "defined" by his race, Parker shocked even his co-commentator, Stephen A. Smith (impressive!), when he said, "My question, which is just a straight honest question: Is he a brother, or is he a cornball brother?... He's black, he kind of does his thing, but he's not really down with the cause. He's not one of us." The comments leaped off the show and into the national conversation, sparking an ugly debate about RG3's "blackness." Parker was suspended and eventually let go.

Now, in the Redskins weight room, I notice RG3 giving me a look as he mouths the lyrics to the song he's just cued up, like he wants to make sure I notice. I'm labeled a thug because I come from the gutter / Robert made it out now he a cornball brother—what? / That was such a stupid argument / Now Rob Parker working at the supermarket, ha!!! It's called "Changed the Game," and it's by Quistar, a rapper from Waco, Texas, who knows Griffin from their high-school days. Who still says "Down for the cause," dawg, it's 2013 / Would you say that's a slap in the face to Martin Luther King's dream.

I laugh and RG3 cracks a big satisfied grin back. When I express surprise that I haven't heard the song, his answer is unexpected. "I haven't blown the song up, because I don't think it's right to make fun of Rob Parker for losing his job," he says. "There's some wrong in what he said, but there's some wrong in him losing his job as well. And I don't want people to think that I, you know, that I'm trying to stick it to Rob Parker, or that I'm happy he lost his job. But I was very unhappy with the things he said. I mean, why did he say that?"

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So is RG3 "All In for Week 1," as he claims in an Adidas ad? It's the question that has devoured the entire off-season. Or at least the part of the off-season not devoured by the fusillade of questions Shanahan faced after the Seattle loss. The ones about whether the Redskins head coach should have overruled his bullheaded but clearly hobbled rookie QB and taken him out. The borderline-hostile questions about whether he, the 61-year-old man in charge, should have made the long-view decision that would have prevented the injury that now threatens the future of the franchise.

Griffin is thoroughly and understandably sick of these questions. He takes pains to point out that "all in" means he's doing everything he can to be ready. It's his "goal." (Shanahan, drily: "Well, you always want somebody to have goals, that's for sure.") Griffin says his rehab is ahead of schedule and that he expects to start the regular season. Ultimately, though, both the quarterback= and his coach maintain that it'll be the doctors who decide.

As for why the hell he stayed in the Seattle game when anyone could see that he was way too hurt to play, Griffin tells me that he's already said—many times—what he's going to say about that, which is that it was the playoffs, his team needed him, gridiron warrior cliché, etc., etc., etc. But then, when I half-jokingly ask if he has any rehab advice for Bryce Harper, the Washington Nationals left fielder who has just tried to play through his own knee injury, only to reinjure himself and miss more than a month of the season, Griffin's nuanced answer shows that he's beginning to understand how to survive long-term in the NFL.

"If I start talking about Bryce, I'll be a Captain Hindsight, which is what we call people who say, 'Should've done that.' But okay, being a Captain Hindsight, if doc tells you to sit out, you sit out," he says. "I'm a team guy. That's why I was out there playing with the injury I had. I wasn't doing that for self-fame. I was doing that for the team. I wanted to show that I'll do anything for them. So much so that I blew my knee out, and that's fine. But I think, after the fact, that while you have to do what's best for the team, you also have to do what's best for you. So if his [Harper's] knee is messed up and it's not responding, then he doesn't play. That would be my advice to Bryce: Whatever they tell you, you decide what to do for you, and that's best for the team."

Whenever he comes back, week one or week four or week nine (fat chance), all those questions about the balance between his running game and passing attack will surface once again. In fact, they've never really gone away, not even in the doldrums of the off-season. In May, RG3's dad told The Washington Post, "I just know that based on what I know Robert can do, he doesn't have to be a runner as much as I saw last year.... I'm his dad—I want him throwing that football, a lot. A lot."

When I speak to RG2, he makes an effort to be diplomatic. "I will not tell Coach Shanahan how to do any part of his job," he says, "because he's been doing this for a long time." But he stands by his opinion—and then some.

"You tell a kid that you want him to be there for fourteen years, guess what? Historical data will tell you that the more he runs, the more subject he is to career injury," he says. "You name one quarterback out there that would rather run the football than throw the football and I'll show you a loser."

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RG3 and his mom have a long-running tradition. Every week during football season, normally on Thursday or Friday, he sits down in front of her and she braids his hair. "In the military, it was very important that you kept your appearance neat and tidy," says Jackie. "You don't want him to be all messed up. You want him to look nice and neat and putting his best foot forward."

There's nothing superstitious or ritualistic about it, it's just a "bonding time" for mother and son to sit quietly and catch up. They talk about life, and they talk about football. About playing smart and playing safe. They talk about being grateful for all they have, about maintaining a constant relationship with God. Not outwardly, so everyone has to hear it, but inwardly. Privately. And sometimes, when they've finished talking, they'll put their hands together and do the same thing that, if all goes according to plan, many of us will be doing the first time RG3 sprints into hostile Eagles territory: "Just praying."

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